Tuesday, May 14

Further on Bryony Brind's complaint about the lack of native-born dancers in the Royal Ballet.

“We've got plenty of talent there — it's just not getting through and that's not good enough."

Last night the Royal Ballet said while they agreed there were a lack of “British dancers”, they said the company did not train performers and hired “the best”, which included many performers from around the world.

Beautiful multimedia elements, present from the start of the show, more than made up for what a ballet lacks in genre-specific storytelling capabilities. At times, the singers, maps, videos and quotes made it feel almost like a silent film, which is fitting both for the era and for storytelling within the performance. The performance began by projecting what Gertrude Stein told Hemingway about himself and his compatriots onto a set piece suspended above the dancers' heads: "You are all a Lost Generation."

Two works were new. Students from the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School looked impressive (despite one spill) in Raymond Lukens’s “Cortège.” And Marcelo Gomes’s duet for Julie Kent and a shirtless Roberto Bolle began with the kind of fluent, intimate partnering at which Mr. Gomes excels as a dancer. But his inexperience as a choreographer showed as he obscured the relationship with embroidery and sank it into melodrama.

"Cortège" was equally as moving in its own way, as it featured dancers from the ABT Studio Company and from the upper level of ABT's JKO school. It was a formal exercise set to infectious music by Rimsky-Korsakov by Raymond Lukens, a teacher at the JKO school. The choreography was, in sociological terms, "age-appropriate"--this was not an audition for "Dancing with the Stars". The dancers were clear, clean, and elegant (though one girl took an unfortunate tumble). The choreography was more of a class demonstration than a real musical exploration, but it was fun to watch.

Of the three choreographers commissioned in this program, Amy Seiwert faced perhapsthe greatest challenge: to update Bronislava Nijinska's frothy, giddy Les Biches. The original was considered exceptionally daring back in 1924, with its allusions to sexual hijinks among the demi-mondaines and its depiction of bisexuality. In 2013, these themes risk putting a hip Bay Area crowd to sleep.

Seiwert wisely does not try to pile on shocking new plot twists. Instead, she injects a contemporary lyricism into the choreography....

He danced with Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater) in New York in the early 1940s and with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo from 1945 to 1952. From 1957 to 1959, he was a soloist in New York City Ballet.....

Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina established the School of the Arts (now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts) in Winston-Salem as a public arts conservatory in 1963, offering courses at the high school and college levels. (It now has a graduate program.) Mr. Lindgren was its first dean of dance, from 1965 to 1987. He also founded and directed its professional ballet troupe, North Carolina Dance Theater.

A column on Liam Scarlett and 'Hansel and Gretel' by Katie Colombus in The Stage.

It’s a process of drawing out the internal, and presenting it in an external manner. To make a true work of art for Liam, it seems everything stems from the emotions. But does he think about the audience? He said: “With a narrative work it’s not so much about steps it’s more about generating a story and an emotion that’s very accessible. Then you can build up the steps. It’s talking about those emotions, it’s building up from there and then you can start layering the steps in and making it a dance piece so that it fuses seamlessly into something that someone can really understand and yet show them an art form that they might not be familiar with.”

A review of Audrey Niffenegger's book "Raven Girl" by Douglas Wolk in The Washington Post.

Niffenegger’s text pauses every few pages for one of her prettily textured if wobbly aquatint illustrations.The most striking sequence is the opening, in which a postman is tasked with delivering a letter to a raven’s nest. He carries home a fledgling and they fall in love. After a witty pause, they have an egg, from which hatches a human girl who can only speak the language of ravens. So far, so fabulistic. But then, unfortunately, Niffenegger’s tale strays from the path — always a bad thing to do in fairy tales — and her book loses its promising strangeness.

Almost all the principal dancers were onstage, with the exception of Russian sensation Natalia Osipova, whose minor foot injury set off a domino chain of recasting. This didn’t stop Osipova’s fiancé, Ivan Vasiliev, from giving a jet-propelled performance in “Le Corsaire.” Bare-chested and slathered orange with man-tan, he posed with burning stares, then took off in a circuit of double air turns, going straight up like a rocket out of a silo. It was a mouthwatering mix of epic technique and epic kitsch.